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Frozen assets

26 January 2002

By Alison Motluk in Toronto

PUTTING your eggs on ice to prevent them being damaged by ageing or medical
treatments is looking more feasible.

One group has successfully transplanted entire ovaries back into rats after
freezing them, while another has shown that adding a little sugar to ripe human
eggs greatly increases their chances of surviving a spell in the deep
freeze.

A team at McGill University in Montreal slowly froze eight fresh rat ovaries
after bathing them in a solution containing the cryoprotectants fructose and
dimethylsulphoxide. All eight survived defrosting and transplantation back into
other rats, though the level …